For poseurs only: HarperCollins launches “video books”

Would you pay $10 to watch an author sum up his new book for 20 minutes while …

HarperCollins has just launched a new format called the "video book"—leading one Ars staffer to ask, after hearing the news, "Aren't those called movies?"

But movies aren't generally 23-minute productions that feature a book author giving the Cliffs Notes version of his work in front of a blank white background. HarperCollins' first effort comes from blogger/Real Journalist/academic/Davos gadfly/TV critic Jeff Jarvis, who pitches his new book What Would Google Do?.

"Scintillating" this production is not, but HarperCollins clearly wants to do something buzzworthy in the book market; using the author of the "Buzzmachine" blog to do it must have felt almost fated by the gods. But the suggestions of the gods must be acted on with care.

Understanding "viral"

As a term, "video book" is execrable, joining terms like "circle back" and "out of pocket" in the linguistic Hall of Shame, but the problems here go deeper than the name. For instance, HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray told Publishers Weekly, "A video edition of Jeff’s book is a terrific example of a product that is both a viral marketing tool and possibly a new revenue stream."

At least Murray emphasizes the "possible" nature of the revenue stream. This video is essentially a brief distillation of the book's main idea, but Jarvis has already provided that on his blog. Critics have distilled it in their reviews. Jarvis has used it as the basis of a BusinessWeek cover story. He also talked about it in a free six-minute BusinessWeek video. Et cetera.

Anyone not interested in these summaries is unlikely to plunk down ten dollars to watch a brief video, while anyone interested in the book will want to read the entire thing—one hopes, at least, that business leaders who might take the ideas to heart would do so on the basis of more than a 20-minute talk.

That leaves as the target audience for these video books a group that I'll refer to as "business poseurs," those who want to know what recent important/trendy books say without actually wading through all that tiresome evidence and argument.

The video books (come on, they're just recorded summations) would seem to work much better if given away freely to encourage the buying of full-content books, e-books, or audio recordings. As it is, the barrier to watching the video is high enough to keep casual visitors away from the video altogether and to deter anyone who has watched the video from spending even more money to get more of the book's actual content.

Still, I have to admit to at least a morbid interest in seeing a fiction author make such a video book. Watching Neal Stephenson retell the entire Cryptonomicon in 20 minutes? Who knows, that might actually go viral.